The first roadblock was allegedly thrown up by a Vancouver Police Department clerk, Sandy Cameron. From 1979 to 2001 — an awful period marked by Robert Pickton’s serial murder spree —Ms. Cameron was assigned to the VPD’s missing persons unit. She was supposed to handle calls and complaints, and direct new cases to police officers.

Ms. Cameron was the wrong person for the job. Sometimes, she was dismissive when people called. Plain rude. Sometimes, she berated concerned relatives, the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry has heard, and she seemed not to take all reports seriously.

According to Ms. Cameron, who testified at the inquiry this week, she encountered some roadblocks herself: a lack of police resources assigned to missing person files, something she had flagged in the early 1990s; poor case management; sexist attitudes within the VPD. She claims she was once harassed by a drunken staff-sergeant after hours.

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The inquiry is supposed to examine how police investigated the disappearance of dozens of sex-trade workers between 1997 to 2002, the year of Pickton’s arrest. He was eventually charged with killing 26 women and in 2007 was convicted of six counts of second-degree murder. The remaining charges were stayed.

“I have been vilified,” she said in cross-examination Tuesday. “I have been the target. People have been allowed to say everything and anything about me, without documentation to back it up.”

She has been made a scapegoat in this sad and sordid affair.

According to an internal VPD review of its missing women investigations, prepared well before the public inquiry was formed, Ms. Cameron “was accused by some family members of the missing women of being racist, of ignoring complaints from the families of sex-trade workers, and of misrepresenting herself as a police officer … Every police officer interviewed for this review who had worked with [Ms. Cameron] in the Missing Persons Unit from 1995 until she left in late 2001 gave statements that corroborated some or all of these complaints.”

Written by VPD deputy chief Doug LePard, the review says that in some instances, Ms. Cameron’s behaviour was “inappropriate and prejudicial.” But, it goes on, “the allegations do not sustain an inference of systemic bias throughout the VPD organization.”

Considered on their own, perhaps they do not. But evidence already put before inquiry commissioner Wally Oppal demonstrates that the VPD was rife with prejudice, and that missing skid-row prostitutes were a low police priority. Such conditions allowed Pickton to snatch from Vancouver’s ugly Downtown Eastside dozens of sex-trade workers — many of them aboriginal — for years.

Consider the testimony this week from another civilian VPD worker, Rae-Lynn Dicks. The former 911 call operator told the inquiry that one police sergeant said of a missing woman: “Who cares? It’s just another hooker.” Ms. Dicks recalled a different VPD officer referring to sex workers as “the scum of the earth … We’re not going to waste valuable time looking for them.”

And she described when a prostitute called 911 to report an attack.

“She gave me a partial [licence] plate number and she was sounding weaker and weaker and passed out. I heard her fall,” said Ms. Dicks.

A VPD officer disregarded the complaint, she claimed.

“It’s just a hooker,” he allegedly said. “Hookers can’t be raped.”

The woman had been sexually assaulted with a tennis racquet.

“Hooker” was used inside VPD headquarters all the time, recalled Ms. Cameron.

“The word was flying left, right and centre around the building,” she testified Tuesday.

She used it herself in an email, she admitted. That she apologized for using the word, in the same email, means she knew at the time it was wrong.

The VPD is still an “old boys’ club,” noted Ms. Dicks, although police have learned to not denigrate and dismiss the most desperate members of society, even with pejorative words. But here’s a terrible irony: Some commission of inquiry staff have allegedly made sexist comments and belittled prostitutes behind closed doors.

“You should spend less time working behind your desk, and a lot more time working on your ass,” one senior employee is alleged to have said to a female colleague.

The allegations came to light last month. They may not “sustain an inference of systemic bias,” to steal a phrase from the VPD, but Mr. Oppal felt them serious enough to order an internal investigation, and the commission’s executive director has been placed on paid leave. Had the VPD taken similar steps back in the day ­— had anyone cared to dismantle the roadblocks — we might not be having the present discussion at all.

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